SANTA MONICA, Calif. – This year’s Olympic Games in Paris underscored the power of live sports to deliver meaningful cultural moments to a broad audience, and to provide opportunities for participating sponsors to achieve their branding goals.
“You get tremendous brand lift, recognition, awareness and the appropriate adjacency that really can drive all key indicators for your business,” Kelly Metz, chief investment officer at Omnicom Group’s OMD USA, said in this interview at the Beet Retreat Santa Monica with Beet.TV contributor Rob Williams.
“We’re laser-focused on those cultural signals, those relevant moments that are really going to meet the consumer and be particularly authentic for our advertisers,” she said. “The growing importance of sports and live events to really drive those moments that matter across the U.S. population — there’s going to be continued investment across the board in sports.”
Women’s Sports
While men’s sports leagues such as the National Football League dominate television ratings, women’s sports are undergoing a transformation as female athletes build social-media followings that translate into television viewership. Caitlin Clark, considered one of the greatest college athletes of all-time, helped to sell out arenas and boost TV ratings for the Women’s National Basketball Association after she was drafted by the Indiana Fever.
“The Caitlin Clark phenomenon throughout the year and her impact on the WNBA has just been tremendous to watch,” Metz said. “For our brands that are associated with it, it’s provided tremendous value. This will continue to signify more and more investment in these moments.”
Big-Tech Bidding
Technology companies such as Apple, Amazon and Netflix in the past decade have bought the rights to stream live sports as part of their efforts to gain more subscribers to their video platforms. Their deep pockets have made them major competitors to traditional media companies such as Disney, CBS and Comcast.
“We are seeing increasingly sports exist behind some form of paywall,” Metz said. “What’s interesting is to watch our partners navigate that environment because we know they need to do it to make the economics work….I is so vital to understand what the impact of that will be on sports viewership and our affiliation with sports in these moments over time.”
YouTube’s Popularity on CTV
While YouTube’s roots are in sharing videos on personal computers, the popularity of connected television has expanded the platform’s audience. In fact, a significant amount of viewer time spent with CTV consists of watching YouTube.
“YouTube is a tremendously powerful platform and it’s very cheap, efficient reach,” Metz said. “The nuance to YouTube is there’s so much there. Advertisers have to be very specific about their brand suitability, controls and what they’re actually engaging with on YouTube.”
A significant part of buying advertising on YouTube involves audience targeting and monitoring viewer behavior to ensure ads are seen by the right consumers.
“Another nuance about YouTube is a lot of that viewership is also purchased via some of our core partners,” Metz said. “We can buy a ton of YouTube impressions that exist on the YouTube platform via NBC because it’s their content that’s fueling the viewership…It’s not going to slow down, I’ll tell you that. It’s only going to accelerate.”
CTV Advertising Needs Better Pricing for Brands: OMD’s Kelly Metz
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